How Analytics and Smart Routing Help to Maximise Inbound Call Efficiency

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In today's fast-paced and customer-centric world, the efficiency of your inbound call centre can make or break your business. Whether you lead a sales team aiming to close more deals, or a support team dedicated to resolving customer issues swiftly, leveraging advanced tools like analytics and smart routing can significantly enhance your operational effectiveness.

We recently hosted a webinar: Maximise Inbound Call Efficiency with Aircall. Here, our experts expanded on how to supercharge your inbound call centre’s efficiency using Analytics and Smart Routing. Here, we’ll break down the key takeaways and practical applications discussed during the session. Or, you can watch the replay here.

Let’s explore how analytics and smart routing can optimise your inbound call centre, focusing on three key areas:

1. How analytics helps inbound sales and support leaders assess, adjust, and reassess their efficiency to maximise performance.

2. How analytics can help inbound sales and support leaders better understand their customers and prospects, and ultimately serve them more effectively.

3. How smart routing can balance speed and quality in handling inbound calls.

Leverage Analytics to Track, Adapt, and Succeed

Analytics is a powerful tool that can provide invaluable insights into your inbound call centre's performance. For both sales and support leaders, having access to detailed analytics allows you to make data-driven decisions that can drastically improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Schedule your team around customer and prospect demand

One of the most significant benefits of using analytics in an inbound call centre is the ability to optimise your team schedule. By analysing call volume trends and agent performance metrics, you can ensure that your team is adequately staffed during peak times. For example, Analytics+ offers heatmaps that display the busiest times of the week, helping you schedule additional agents when they're most needed. This ensures that you're not missing potential inbound sales opportunities or providing poor service to your customers due to staffing issues.

Build a data-driven IVR and call routing setup

Analytics also plays a crucial role in optimising your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and call routing setup. High call abandonment rates during certain stages of the IVR process can indicate that adjustments are necessary. Using tools like Aircall's Inbound and Unanswered Calls dashboards (available on the Professional plan, and with an enhanced version on Analytics+), you can evaluate and reevaluate your call routing setup to minimise missed calls and improve the overall caller experience. For instance, if you notice a high number of abandoned calls in a specific IVR branch, you can take targeted actions like scheduling more agents to handle calls routed to that branch.

Understand what your customers and prospects need

By using call tagging, you’ll be able to leverage Aircall Analytics to track trends over time, and tailor your services to meet your customers’ and prospects’ needs more effectively.

Adapt to trends in prospect calls

For sales teams, understanding prospect behavior and preferences is crucial. By monitoring calls with particular tags, sales leaders can identify which products or services generate the most interest and tailor their pitches accordingly. For example, if a high volume of calls is tagged with "Interested in Product X," sales leaders can train their team to promote that product specifically or highlight that product in sales calls. With these insights, sales teams can allocate resources where they're needed most and ultimately close more deals. This data-driven approach ensures that sales efforts are aligned with customer needs and preferences, maximising the chances of success.

Adapt to trends in customer calls

Support teams also benefit greatly from understanding caller needs. Not only can support leaders identify trends relating to the number of calls with specific tags, they can also identify trends across different metrics like SLA percentage and unanswered call rate. The Inbound and Inbound+ dashboards, for example, allow you to monitor key metrics per tag to quickly identify any inconsistencies in support across specific product areas, topics raised, and so on.  For instance, if calls tagged with “delivery issue” are associated with an excessively high Time in IVR, that might indicate that callers with this issue are finding it difficult to know which menu options to select. 

By tracking call tags with analytics, support teams are better equipped to proactively identify and address any inefficiencies or other issues across their support team. This not only improves customer satisfaction but also helps in refining support strategies for a more seamless and satisfying customer experience.

Balance speed and quality with Smart Routing

Also known as the Ring-to (via API) widget on Aircall’s dynamic call routing system Smartflows, Smart Routing uses the data living in your CRM, helpdesk, or in Aircall itself, to automatically route callers to the best person to handle the call. This is an advanced feature that can significantly improve not only the efficiency of your inbound call centre, but also your callers’ inbound experience, allowing you to effectively balance speed and quality in handling customer and prospect calls.

Speed up time to answer

While IVR menus are important tools for allowing callers to direct themselves to the most appropriate team, an overly complex IVR menu has the potential to lead to lost sales opportunities, or to a customer who’s already bored and frustrated by the time they finally reach an agent. By using Smart Routing to automatically direct calls based on criteria such as language, geography, or the last agent spoken to, you’re able to reduce the time customers and prospects spend navigating different menu options and waiting to speak to a person, enhancing their overall experience. For example, you might like to route calls from VIP customers directly to a dedicated line, ensuring they receive as prompt and personalised a service as possible.

Reduce unanswered calls

Smart routing can also help minimise unanswered calls by directing customers to alternative support methods when necessary. For instance, if a caller isn’t a verified customer found within your CRM system, you can direct them to contact your sales team via live chat instead of routing them through the IVR menu. This ensures that your agents are available to handle more critical calls, reducing the overall volume of unanswered calls and improving customer satisfaction.

Maximise first-touch resolution

Routing customers directly to their account or lead owner, or the last agent they spoke with, ensures that callers are connected to someone who already has the context and can resolve their issues quickly. From a support perspective, this improves first touch resolution rates and enhances customer satisfaction - customers don’t need to repeat their query multiple times when calling back, and are even able to develop a relationship with their account owner. From a sales perspective, it leaves a positive impression on prospects, making them feel remembered and valued.

Efficient, Smart Support

Incorporating analytics and smart routing into your inbound call centre operations can transform how you manage sales and support calls. By optimising team schedules, improving IVR setups, understanding customer needs, and ensuring efficient call routing, you can significantly enhance your team's performance and provide exceptional service to your customers and prospects.

Ready to experience the benefits of advanced analytics and smart routing firsthand? Start your free trial today

Published on September 13, 2024.